This is not a “Covid-19 guide” or a bunch of advice from a stranger on the Internet. There are enough of those and I wouldn’t trust most of them. These are the simple yet profound (for me) lessons I’ve gotten from this all. I share them publicly because A) I think they are pretty decent and B) maybe you’ll find that they rhyme with your own sense-making of this all.
They are not advice, dogma or strategies, but tenets that I think will shape my perception for years to come.
1.I was lucky to have a diverse but coherent information diet
My information diet (this was a bit of an accident) revolves mostly around Twitter and that was instrumental in me not being taken entirely by surprise by Covid-19.
Twitter gives you access to experts from all walks of life. Unlike Facebook (that is more about people you actually know) or Instagram (that is skewed heavily towards one-way communication), Twitter links you directly to people, their ideas AND how others interact with these. This is central: on IG (and LinkedIn, really), reality is cropped, framed and filtered to come to you as final. On Twitter people will actually question, mock, incentivize or share ideas.
The people I follow on twitter tend to belong to two groups: domain experts and sense-makers, that have an ability to connect different threads into manageable takes that can help you understand and act on the world.
This information diet has helped me consider multiple sides of arguments, find out holes in my thinking and even make some friends. On a very real note, being on Twitter has allowed me to buy masks way back in February, both for me and my family.
The reality of skewed media, of how each side is framing things in a specific way (that can be both true and disingenuous) became very apparent. It takes a lot more work and clearly is not for everybody, but pruning your sources of information is a massively important skill.
2. To persuade, I need to be much better at creating compelling stories
I’m a fan of the literary genre of “Big History” (e.g. Guns, Germs and Steel, A Brief History of Nearly Everything, Sapiens) and something I keep forgetting is that humans are rational when compared to animals, but mostly, we are symbolic. We face reality and its infinite hall of mirrors and create simplified models to make sense of things. Mythology, Religion, Philosophy, Politics. None of this is properly real, but it shapes the world around us.
I struggle personally with this, as I’m always grasping at straws, looking for a unifying theory of everything (this might explain the interest in “Big History”), but there is none.
When signs of impending trouble became clear I tried to warn friends and family (around late February) and was almost always met with condescendence. Because my blindspot is the illusion that humans are rational, I tried to argue logically and present what proven science and data was available. But this changed nobody’s mind. The only people who changed opinions did so out of a prior personal tendency to be overly pessimistic. Perhaps even myself only cared because I have this tendency.
Complex problems often have cumbersome explanations that do not fit within a unique worldview. If you are dispassionate (or passionate about pretending to be dispassionate) you may update your worldview to the model. But nobody does this. People only change via stories. And this is why Covid-19 went from being no “big deal” to a “bioweapon from China”, at least in the minds of a lot of people. Because that’s a story that clicks with their worldview.
People are convinced through stories that provide the sort of answers they are already looking for. Every message with universal appeal trades accuracy for reach. In situations like Covid-19, when there’s too much happening at the same time, stories compete in a cambrian explosion of narratives of which only a few will emerge victorious (even if imprecise).
3. I can’t hope to understand all the systems that guide our world
I’m far from understanding much about Complexity Science, Systems Thinking and other related fields. But they seem more and more obvious everywhere we look. And a lot of these systems, despite being man-made, don’t really have a cognitive human scale. We can’t understand them or the way they interact. They govern our world (I’m not talking about Artificial Intelligence) but we can’t predict precisely what they’ll do. This seems to be one of the reasons why when things fall apart, their demise ripples through 2nd, 3rd and nth order effects. Like the joke goes: “Some dude ate a bat in China and now I’ve lost my job in Brazil”.
Strategies and plans, both from the government and private companies always start with an understanding of context. How do things interact? How do they work? If they keep working like this, where will they be in the future? Investments in Infrastructure, Education, Defense and so on all rely on these models of reality.
As systems connect and interact, their decay contaminates other industries and fields and all of your models are bound to be twisted beyond recognition.
In our homes and workplaces, everything we see or touch has traces of these global networks of commerce. Wash an UV light over it and hundreds of fingerprints, receipts, records, logs, stubs and entries on a ledger appear.
If everything is connected. If things that move up or down can be amplified through feedback loops. If efficiency has been squeezed out of every operation until there’s no fat, no buffer. It seems evident that times will be more turbulent for a while. Not just because of Covid-19, but because of everything else we don’t even know exists.
For the most part, our world follows a few logical rules we can think with. But “logic” is perhaps a continuum. Not something fixed. Things make sense until they don’t. There’s a threshold on our comprehension of the world: past a certain point all we know is that there’s no more toilet paper anywhere. All of this uncertainty is both unknown and unknowable and there’s nobody at the wheel. Not even Jesus.
Firewalls, citadels, secret tunnels
- My information diet gave me an heads-up.
- I’ve tried to share that information with others.
- I’ve learned that you can’t scale the understanding of complex, uncomfortable things (who would have said?).
- I’ve realized how there’s nobody at the helm of this massive system of systems.
What to do with these?
A good sign I’m reaching something of value is how it lends itself to compression. If I can boil it all down to a couple of platitudes it has probably lost all of its bite.
So these ideas have some tension in them and defy precise placement. Also, none of them is new or groundbreaking, but the past few weeks have made the difference between knowing these ideas and having them etched in my mind.
To resist a certain degree of instability I need to create some buffers or firewalls. Like all vaults are vulnerable to the right team of thieves, all buffers will eventually be exhausted and penetrated by a large enough impact. But as an analogy, they are easy to understand and as we’ve seen before, that matters. An obvious one is liquid cash that puts some distance between just bad times and destitution. A good network of people you actually know is also a sort of firewall in that it protects you from being in the dark about people you might need to work with at some point.
These buffers act to create a more defensible position, a last stand against chaos.
They encircle a citadel of will. Just as a citadel is a smaller part of a castle, my citadel of will can only hold and protect so much. This is not about being cool, affording nice vacations or buying exciting stuff. This is about retaining ability to make personal moves. A definition of poverty is having no choices and this citadel should defend my ability to retain some baseline level of agency even in turbulent times.
More importantly, citadels are not supposed to hold just one person. Those would be sarcophaguses. Citadels should protect those immediate to me and not on a patronizing-come-stay-at-my-bunker-i’ll-take-care-of-you way, but in a let’s-make-a-working-team-way. A way of achieving a somewhat local self-sufficiency, at least a barebones one.
Like that quote about ships being safe at their harbor (but that’s not what ships are for) is appropriate here. What kind of strategy is just to hunker down indefinitely with a bunch of friends and rationing metaphorical tuna?
Not all, but many castles have secret passages that can go on for miles underground, providing a way for the besieged to get out. These tunnels are not meant solely to escape but to contact the outer world, ask for help, share what information is available. In a certain way, you information diet can be part of this system. It certainly felt like that back in mid January.
In effect, all I’m saying is about closing off and opening up in selective ways. Closing off to unnecessary complexity, dependence and fragility and opening up to ideas and opportunities from people in similar situations. For me it’s very hard to know which is which, when to shut down an avenue that won’t take me anywhere but to panic-town or when to start a conversation that will shine a light on something good I had not seen.
the end
We are symbolic beings and these images don’t pretend to hold the Ultimate Truth. But right now, they make sense to me, and perhaps, should you see things in a similar way, could make sense to you.
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